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My reading material and video watching habits these past two weeks have brought me some incredible joy and happiness. Why? Because Najam Ahmad of Facebook is finally getting some credit for the amazing work that he has done and been doing in the world of Software Defined Networking. In my opinion Najam is a Force Majeure in the networking world. He is passionate. He is focused. He just gets things done. Najam and I worked very closely at Microsoft as we built out and managed the company’s global infrastructure. So closely in fact that we were frequently referred to as brothers from different mothers. Wherever Najam was-I was not far behind, and vice versa. We laughed. We cried. We fought. We had alot of fun while delivered some pretty serious stuff. To find out that he is behind the incredible Open Compute Project advances in Networking is not surprising at all. Always a forward thinking guy he has never been satisfied with the status quo.

If you have missed any of that coverage you I strongly encourage you to have a read at the links below.

This got me to thinking about the legacy of the Microsoft program on the Cloud and Infrastructure Industry at large. Data Center Knowledge had an article covering the impact of some of the Yahoo Alumni a few years ago. Many of those folks are friends of mine and deserve great credit. In fact, Tom Furlong now works side by side with Najam at Facebook. The purpose of my thoughts are not to take away from their achievements and impacts on the industry but rather to really highlight the impact of some of the amazing people and alumni from the Microsoft program. Its a long overdue acknowledgement of the legacy of that program and how it has been a real driving force in large scale infrastructure. The list of folks below is by no means comprehensive and doesnt talk about the talented people Microsoft maintains in their deep stable that continue to drive the innovative boundaries of our industry.

Christian Belady of Microsoft – Here we go, first person mentioned and I already blow my own rule. I know Christian is still there at Microsoft but its hard not to mention him as he is the public face of the program today. He was an innovative thinker before he joined the program at Microsoft and was a driving thought leader and thought provoker while I was there. While his industry level engagements have been greatly sidelined as he steers the program into the future – he continues to be someone willing to throw everything we know and accept today into the wind to explore new directions.

Najam Ahmad of Facbook – You thought I was done talking about this incredible guy? Not in the least, few people have solved network infrastructure problems at scale like Najam has. With his recent work on the OCP front finally coming to the fore, he continues to drive the capabilities of what is possible forward. I remember long meetings with Network vendors where Najam tried to influence capabilities and features with the box manufacturers within the paradigm of the time, and his work at Facebook is likely to end him up in a position where he is both loved and revilved by the Industry at large. If that doesn’t say your an industry heavy weight…nothing does.

James Hamilton of Amazon – There is no question that James continues to drive deep thinking in our industry. I remain an avid reader of his blog and follower of his talks. Back in my Microsoft days we would sit and argue philosophical issues around the approach to our growth, towards compute, towards just about everything. Those conversations either changed or strengthed my positions as the program evolved. His work in the industry while at Microsoft and beyond has continued to shape thinking around data centers, power, compute, networking and more.

Dan Costello of Google – Dan Costello now works at Google, but his impacts on the Generation 3 and Generation 4 data center approaches and the modular DC industry direction overall will be felt for a very long time to come whether Google goes that route or not. Incredibly well balanced in his approach between technology and business his ideas and talks continue to shape infrastructre at scale. I will spare people the story of how I hired him away from his previous employer but if you ever catch me at a conference, its a pretty funny story. Not to mention the fact that he is the second best break dancer in the Data Center Industry.

Nic Bustamonte of Google – Nic is another guy who has had some serious impact on the industry as it relates to innovating the running and operating of large scale facilities. His focus on the various aspects of the operating environments of large scale data centers, monioring, and internal technology has shifted the industry and really set the infancy for DCIM in motion. Yes, BMS systems have been around forever, and DCIM is the next interation and blending of that data, but his early work here has continued to influence thinking around the industry.

Arne Josefsberg of ServiceNow – Today Arne is the CTO of Service Now, and focusing on infrastructure and management for enterprises to the big players alike and if their overall success is any measure, he continues to impact the industry through results. He is *THE* guy who had the foresight of building an organiation to adapt to this growing change of building and operating at scale. He the is the architect of building an amazing team that would eventually change the industry.

Joel Stone of Savvis/CenturyLink – Previously the guy who ran global operations for Microsoft, he has continued to drive excellence in Operations at Global Switch and now at Savvis. An early adopter and implmenter of blending facilities and IT organizations he mastered issues a decade ago that most companies are still struggling with today.

Sean Farney of Ubiquity – Truly the first Data center professional who ever had to productize and operationalize data center containers at scale. Sean has recently taken on the challenge of diversifying data center site selection and placement at Ubquity repurposing old neighorbood retail spaces (Sears, etc) in the industry. Given the general challenges of finding places with a confluence of large scale power and network, this approach may prove to be quite interesting as markets continue to drive demand.

Chris Brown of Opscode – One of the chief automation architects at my time at Microsoft, he has moved on to become the CTO of Opscode. Everyone on the planet who is adopting and embracing a DevOps has heard of, and is probably using, Chef. In fact if you are doing any kind of automation at large scale you are likely using his code.

None of these people would be comfortable with the attention but I do feel credit should be given to these amazing individuals who are changing our industry every day. I am so very proud to have worked the trenches with these people. Life is always better when you are surrounded by those who challenge and support you and in my opinion these folks have taken it to the next level.

Its one of those times I really hate to be right. As many of you know I have been talking about the various grass roots efforts afoot across many of the Member EU countries to start driving a more significant tax regimen on Internet based companies. My predictions for the last few years have more been cautionary tales based on what I saw happening from a regulatory perspective on a much smaller scale, country to country.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article discussing France’s movements to begin taxation on Internet related companies who derive revenue from users and companies across the entirety of the EU, but holding those companies responsible to the tax base in each country. This could likely mean that such legislation is likely to become quite fractured and tough for Internet Companies to navigate. The French proposition is asking the European Commission to draw up proposals by the Spring of 2014.

This is likely to have a very interesting (read as cost increases) across just about every aspect of Internet and Cloud Computing resources. From a business perspective this is going to increase costs which will likely be passed on to consumers in small but interesting ways. Internet advertising will need to be differentiated on a country by country basis, and advertisers will end up having different cost structures, Cloud Computing Companies will DEFINITELY need to understand where instances of customer instances were, and whether or not they were making money. Potentially more impactful, customers of Cloud computing may be held to account for taxation accountability that they did not know they had! Things like Data Center Site Selection are likely going to become even more complicated from a tax analysis perspective as countries with higher populations will likely become no-go zones (perhaps) or require the passage of even more restrictive laws around it.

Its not like the seeds of this haven’t been around since 2005, I think most people just preferred to keep a blind eye to the tax that the seed was sprouting into a full fledged tree. Going back to my Cat and Mouse Papers from a few years ago… The Cat has caught the mouse, its now the mouse’s move.

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Authors Note: If you don’t have a subscription to the WSJ, All Things Digital did a quick synopsis of the article here.

I thought I would start my first post by addressing the second New York Times article first. Why? Because it specifically mentions activities and messages sourced from me at the time when I was responsible for running the Microsoft Data Center program. I will try to track the timeline mentioned in the article with my specific recollections of the events. As Paul Harvey used to say, so then you could know the ‘REST of the STORY’.

I remember my first visit to Quincy, Washington. It was a bit of a road trip for myself and a few other key members of the Microsoft site selection team. We had visited a few of the local communities and power utility districts doing our due diligence on the area at large. Our ‘Heat map’ process had led us to Eastern Washington state. Not very far (just a few hours) from the ‘mothership’ of Redmond, Washington. It was a bit of a crow eating exercise for me as just a few weeks earlier I had proudly exclaimed that our next facility would not be located on the West Coast of the United States. We were developing an interesting site selection model that would categorize and weight areas around the world. It would take in FEMA disaster data, fault zones, airport and logistics information, location of fiber optic and carrier presence, workforce distributions, regulatory and tax data, water sources, and power. This was going to be the first real construction effort undertaken by Microsoft. The cost of power was definitely a factor as the article calls out. But just as equal was the generation mix of the power in the area. In this case a predominance of hydroelectric. Low to No carbon footprint (Rivers it turns out actually give off carbon emissions I came to find out). Regardless the generation mix was and would continue to be a hallmark of site selection of the program when I was there. The crow-eating exercise began when we realized that the ‘greenest’ area per our methodology was actually located in Eastern Washington along the Columbia River.

We had a series of meetings with Real Estate folks, the local Grant County PUD, and the Economic Development folks of the area. Back in those days the secrecy around who we were was paramount, so we kept our identities and that of our company secret. Like geeky secret agents on an information gathering mission. We would not answer questions about where we were from, who we were, or even our names. We ‘hid’ behind third party agents who took everyone’s contact information and acted as brokers of information. That was early days…the cloak and dagger would soon come out as part of the process as it became a more advantageous tool to be known in tax negotiations with local and state governments.

During that trip we found the perfect parcel of land, 75 acres with great proximity to local sub stations, just down line from the Dams on the nearby Columbia River. It was November 2005. As we left that day and headed back it was clear that we felt we had found Site Selection gold. As we started to prepare a purchase offer we got wind that Yahoo! was planning on taking a trip out to the area as well. As the local folks seemingly thought that we were a bank or large financial institution they wanted to let us know that someone on the Internet was interested in the area as well. This acted like a lightning rod and we raced back to the area and locked up the land before they Yahoo had a chance to leave the Bay Area. In these early days the competition was fierce. I have tons of interesting tales of cloak and dagger intrigue between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. While it was work there was definitely an air of something big on the horizon. That we were all at the beginning of something. In many ways many of the Technology professionals involved regardless of company forged some deep relationships and competition with each other.

The article talks about how the ‘Gee-Whiz moment faded pretty fast’. While I am sure that it faded in time (as all things do), I also seem to recall the huge increase of local business as thousands of construction workers descended upon this wonderful little town, the tours we would give local folks and city council dignitaries, a spirit of true working together. Then of course there was the ultimate reduction in properties taxes resulting from even our first building and an increase in home values to boot at the time. Its an oft missed benefit that I am sure the town of Quincy and Grant County has continued to benefit from as the Data Center Cluster added Yahoo, Sabey, IAC, and others. I warmly remember the opening day ceremonies and ribbon cutting and a sense of pride that we did something good. Corny? Probably – but that was the feeling. There was no talk of generators. There were no picket signs, in fact the EPA of Washington state had no idea on how to deal with a facility of this size and I remember openly working in partnership on them. That of course eventually wore off to the realities of life. We had a business to run, the city moved on, and concerns eventually arose.

The article calls out a showdown between Microsoft and the Power Utility District (PUD) over a fine for missing capacity forecasting target. As this happened much after I left the company I cannot really comment on that specific matter. But I can see how that forecast could miss. Projecting power usage months ahead is more than a bit of science mixed with art. It gets into the complexity of understanding capacity planning in your data centers. How big will certain projects grow. Will they meet expectations?, fall short?, new product launches can be duds or massive successes. All of these things go into a model to try and forecast the growth. If you think this is easy I would submit that NOONE in the industry has been able to master the crystal ball. I would also submit that most small companies haven’t been able to figure it out either. At least at companies like Microsoft, Google, and others you can start using the law and averages of big numbers to get close. But you will always miss. Either too high, or too low. Guess to low and you impact internal budgeting figures and run rates. Not Good. Guess to high and you could fall victim to missing minimal contracts with utility companies and be subject to fines.

In the case mentioned in the article, the approach taken if true would not be the smartest method especially given the monthly electric bill for these facilities. It’s a cost of doing business and largely not consequential at the amount of consumption these buildings draw. Again, if true, it was a PR nightmare waiting to happen.

At this point the article breaks out and talks about how the Microsoft experience would feel more like dealing with old-school manufacturing rather than ‘modern magic’ and diverts to a situation at a Microsoft facility in Santa Clara, California.

The article references that this situation is still being dealt with inside California so I will not go into any detailed specifics, but I can tell you something does not smell right in the state of Denmark and I don’t mean the Diesel fumes. Microsoft purchased that facility from another company. As the usage of the facility ramped up to the levels it was certified to operate at, operators noticed a pretty serious issue developing. While the building was rated to run at certain load size, it was clear that the underground feeders were undersized and the by-product could have polluted the soil and gotten into the water system. This was an inherited problem and Microsoft did the right thing and took the high road to remedy it. It is my recollection that all sides were clearly in know of the risks, and agreed to the generator usage whenever needed while the larger issue was fixed. If this has come up as a ‘air quality issue’ I personally would guess that there is politics at play. I’m not trying to be an apologist but if true, it goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished.

At this point the article cuts back to Quincy. It’s a great town, with great people. To some degree it was the winner of the Internet Jackpot lottery because of the natural tech resources it is situated on. I thought that figures quoted around taxes were an interesting component missed in many of the reporting I read.

“Quincy’s revenue from property taxes, which data centers do pay, has risen from $815,250 in 2005 to a projected $3.6 million this year, paying for a library and repaved streets, among other benefits, according to Tim Snead, the city administrator.”

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post my job is ultimately to get things done and deliver results. When you are in charge of a capital program as large as Microsoft’s program was at the time – your mission is clear – deliver the capacity and start generating value to the company. As I was presented the last crop of beans harvested from the field at the ceremony we still had some ways to go before all construction and capacity was ready to go. One of the key missing components was the delivery and installation of a transformer for one of the substations required to bring the facility up to full service. The article denotes that I was upset that the PUD was slow to deliver the capacity. Capacity I would add that was promised along a certain set of timelines and promises and commitments were made and money was exchanged based upon those commitments. As you can see from the article, the money exchanged was not insignificant. If Mr. Culbertson felt that I was a bit arrogant in demanding a follow through on promises and commitments after monies and investments were made in a spirit of true partnership, my response would be ‘Welcome to the real world’. As far as being cooperative, by April the construction had already progressed 15 months since its start. Hardly a surprise, and if it was, perhaps the 11 acre building and large construction machinery driving around town could have been a clue to the sincerity of the investment and timelines. Harsh? Maybe. Have you ever built a house? If so, then you know you need to make sure that the process is tightly managed and controlled to ensure you make the delivery date.

The article then goes on to talk about the permitting for the Diesel generators. Through the admission of the Department of Ecology’s own statement, “At the time, we were in scramble mode to permit our first one of these data centers.” Additionally it also states that:

Although emissions containing diesel particulates are an environmental threat, they were was not yet classified as toxic pollutants in Washington. The original permit did not impose stringent limits, allowing Microsoft to operate its generators for a combined total of more than 6,000 hours a year for “emergency backup electrical power” or unspecified “maintenance purposes.”

At the time all this stuff was so new, everyone was learning together. I simply don’t buy that this was some kind Big Corporation versus Little Farmer thing. I cannot comment on the events of 2010 where Microsoft asked for itself to be disconnected from the Grid. Honestly that makes no sense to me even if the PUD was working on the substation and I would agree with the articles ‘experts’.

Well that’s my take on my recollection of events during those early days of the Quincy build out as it relates to the articles. Maybe someday I will write a book as the process and adventures of those early days of birth of Big Infrastructure was certainly exciting. The bottom line is that the data center industry is amazingly complex and the forces in play are as varied as technology to politics to people and everything in between. There is always a deeper story. More than meets the eye. More variables. Decisions are never black and white and are always weighted against a dizzying array of forces.

I have been following with some interest the series of articles in the New York Times by Jim Glanz. The series premiered on Sunday with an article entitled Power, Pollution and the Internet, which was followed up today with a deeper dive in some specific examples. The examples today (Data Barns in a farm town, Gobbling Power and Flexing muscle) focused on the Microsoft program, a program of which I have more than some familiarity since I ran it for many years. After just two articles, reading the feedback in comments, and seeing some of the reaction in the blogosphere it is very clear that there is more than a significant amount of misunderstanding, over-simplification, and a lack of detail I think is probably important. In doing so I want to be very clear that I am not representing AOL, Microsoft, or any other organization other than my own personal observations and opinions.

As mentioned in both of the articles I was one of hundreds of people interviewed by the New York Times for this series. In those conversations with Jim Glanz a few things became very apparent. First – He has been on this story for a very long time, at least a year. As far as journalists go, he was incredibly deeply engaged and armed with tons of facts. In fact, he had a trove of internal emails, meeting minutes, and a mountain of data through government filings that must have taken him months to collect. Secondly, he had the very hard job of turning this very complex space into a format where the uneducated masses can begin to understand it. Therein lies much of the problem – This is an incredibly complex space to try and communicate it to those not tackling it day to day or even understand that technological, regulatory forces involved. This is not an area or topic that can be sifted down to a sound bite. If this were easy, there really wouldn’t be a story would there?

At issue for me is that the complexity of the powers involved seems to get scant attention aiming larger for the “Data Centers are big bad energy vampires hurting the environment” story. Its clearly evident reading through the comments on the both of the articles so far. Claiming that the sources and causes have everything to do from poor web page design to government or multi-national companies conspiracies to corner the market on energy.

So I thought I would take a crack article by article to shed some light (the kind that doesn’t burn energy) on some of the topics and just call out where I disagree completely. In full transparency the “Data Barns” article doesn’t necessarily paint me as a “nice guy”. Sometimes I am. Sometimes I am not. I am not an apologist, nor do I intend to do so in this post. I am paid to get stuff done. To execute. To deliver. Quite frankly the PUD missed deadlines (the progenitor event to my email quoted in the piece) and sometimes people (even utility companies) have to live in the real world of consequences. I think my industry reputation, work, and fundamental stances around driving energy efficiency and environmental conservancy in this industry can stand on its own both publicly and for those that have worked for me.

There is an inherent irony here that these articles were published in both print and electronically to maximize the audience and readership. To do that, these articles made “multiple trips” through a data center, and ultimately reside in one (or more). They seem to denote that keeping things online is bad which seems to go against the availability and need of the articles themselves. Doesn’t the New York times expect to make these articles available on-line for people to read? Its posted online already. Perhaps they expect that their micro-fiche experts would be able to serve the demand for these articles in the future? I do not think so.

This is a complex eco-system of users, suppliers, technology, software, platforms, content creators, data (both BIG and small), regulatory forces, utilities, governments, financials, energy consumption, people, personalities, politics, company operating tenets, community outreach to name a very few. On top of managing through all these variables they also have to keep things running with no downtime.

Everyone has heard of the old sayings “Familiarity breeds contempt”, so I thought it apropos to introduce it as a less understood concept when it comes to large scale Internet mail challenges. The “spark” for me was a copy of a TechCrunch article entitled “Why No one has tamed e-mail” by Gentry Underwood that was forwarded to me this morning. It’s a really good article and highlights some of the challenges the mail space is / has been / continues to go through. Not sure if it really matters, but for full disclosure TechCrunch is an AOL company, although the content was generated by the guest author.

The article highlights many of the challenges with mail today and how it is broken, or more correctly how it has become broken over time. The challenges around SPAM, the content of mail being long and convoluted, most e-mail clients being absolutely terrible and the like. The author also correctly highlights that it’s a hard problem to solve from a technology, design, and business perspective. As good as a primer as I think this article is, there are some larger issues at play here to truly fix the mail problem.

First Problem – This is not an Email Problem

E-Mail is just a symptom of a larger set of challenges. I would posit that the problem space itself has evolved and morphed from e-mail into a “Digital Lifestyle Organization” (DLO) issue. Solving issues relating to e-mail, only solves part of the problem space. The real challenge is that users are now being bombarded by messages, information, news, and the like from tons of different sources. The signal to noise ratio is getting extremely high and is resulting people’s frustrations to grow increasingly caustic. Yes, there is Spam. But there is an equal amount of opt-in notes and messages, social updates from various social media platforms, RSS feeds, News updates, and a lists of other categories. It can all be a bit mind-boggling and off-putting. The real question should not be how to solve the e-mail problem, but rather – how to solve the Digital Lifestyle Organization problem. Mail is simply a single element in the larger problem.

That’s not to say the points in the article are wrong or cant be applied to this wider definition. You still face a huge design, interface, workflow challenge trying to organize this kind of data. The client in whatever form it takes must be easy to use and intuitive. A task that is elusive in the e-mail space to be sure, and is likely to be even more rare in this new “DLO” world.

Second Problem – There is comfort in an old pair of Shoes

One of the interesting things I have learned here at AOL since taking on the role of CTO is that there is actually strata of different kinds of users. I would place myself in the category of power user willing to try and jump platforms for better look/feel, even minor differentiated features and capabilities. This layer of “Technorati” are constantly looking for the next best thing. There are other strata however, that don’t necessarily embrace that kind of rapid change, moderate change, or in fact there are layers that don’t like any change at all! It’s a complicated set of issues and engineering challenges. At a rough business level, you can lose users because you change to much or don’t change at all. Some of my friends in the space consider this a timing issue… of when to perfectly time these transitions. The facts are however, these different stratas change at their own pace and we should understand that certain strata will never change. In essence you have a few options – An introduce a platform that changes regardless of the user base desires, stay stagnant and never change, or try to find some kind of hybrid solution knowing that it may ultimately increase some of the cost structures around supporting different kinds of environments. Unless, of course, you build something new that is SO Compelling at to change the game entirely.

Candidly speaking, this is an issue that AOL has struggled with longer than just about everyone else in the space. Historically speaking we have oscillated across all of these solutions over close to 30 years with varying degrees of success. While we can debate what ‘success’ looks like, there is no denying that we have been looking at the science of e-mail for a long time. With a loyal user base of tens of millions to hundreds of millions users, it provides us with a rich data set to analyze behaviors, usage patterns, user feedback, costs, trends, and the like. Its this data that highlights the different usage patterns and strata of users. Its data that is impossible to get as a start-up, and so immensely massive that categorization is no trivial task.

The process we use in terms of understanding these strata could best be described as ‘Electronic Ethnography’. There are some interesting differentiations in how mail and Digital Lifestyle in aggregate is used across a variety of variables. Things like age, gender, location, locale, friends, social circles, and a host of others all play a role in defining the strata. Simply speaking there are some strata that simply don’t want to change. Others are very comfortable with their current e-mail experience and don’t see a driving need to change, etc.

This essentially nets out to the fact that E-mail and information aggregation is a very complex space. We must face the fact there will be segments of users that will simply not change because something cooler has come about or some features were added or modified. In my personal opinion the only way to truly impact and change these behaviors is to come up with something so compelling, so different, that it changes the game and solves the DLO issues.

Third Problem – BIG and Complex

While this was called out by Gentry Underwood in his article it cannot be stated enough. Whether you focus on mail, the larger DLO space, or any kind of personal information aggregation – there are a host of factors, variables, and challenges to really solve this space. It also drives big infrastructure, operations, and the like. Its not going to be easy. As the TechCrunch article headlines – Go Big or Go Home. It’s a huge problem space, It’s a huge opportunity, and half measures may help but in and of themselves wont do much to move the needle. Mail and what I call the DLO space is a huge opportunity of the future of our usage of the Internet medium, in fact it may be the biggest. There will likely continue to be many casualties trying to solve it.

Fourth Problem – Monetization

From a pure business perspective – Its hard to make money off of mail. The most common way to monetize mail (or aggregated information) is likely to be advertising. However, advertising has a direct negative impact on the overall user experience in general and is a key driver of user loss. You can easily see this in the overall reduction of “advertising” in mail across a number of key players. Another method is tying it to an overall paid user subscription. But this is challenging as well, are the features and overall “stickiness” of your product something that customers will see a continued value for. At AOL we have both models in use. Interestingly, we have users in both models, that fall into the strategy that consider “change” as bad. As mentioned in the third problem, mail is a big problem, and will require some kind of monetization scheme to justify some of the efforts. While the larger players have existing user bases to help with this challenge, it’s a real issue for some of the more innovative ideas coming out of smaller start-ups, and is likely a key reason for their potential demise. The person or firm who comes up with a non-ad/non-subscription based monetization strategy will truly change the game in this space.

With Google’s purchase of Sparrow, the re-design of Microsoft’s Outlook product, some interesting announcements that we have coming out, and a small explosion of start-ups in this space – Things are starting to get interesting. Hard. But interesting for sure. May have to post more on this in the near future.

We wrapped our first full day of talks here at DataCentre2012 and I have to say the content was incredibly good. A couple of the key highlights that really stuck out in my mind were the talk given by Christian Belady who covered some interesting bits of the Microsoft Data Center Strategy moving forward. Of course I have a personal interest in that program having been there for Generation1 through Generation4 of the evolutions of the program. Christian covered some of the technology trends that they are incorporating into their Generation 5 facilities. It was some very interesting stuff and he went into deeper detail than I have heard so far around the concept of co-generation of power at data center locations. While I personally have some doubts about the all-in costs and immediacy of its applicability it was great to see some deep meaningful thought and differentiation out of the Microsoft program. He also went into a some interesting “future” visions which talked about data being the next energy source. While he took this concept to an entirely new level I do feel he is directionally correct. His correlations between the delivery of “data” in a utility model rang very true to me as I have long preached about the fact that we are at the dawning of the Information Utility for over 5 years.

Another fascinating talk came from Oliver J Jones of a company called Chayora. Few people and companies really understand the complexities and idiosyncrasies of doing business let alone dealing with the development and deployment of large scale infrastructure there. The presentation done by Mr. Jones was incredibly well done. Articulating the size, opportunity, and challenges of working in China through the lens of the data center market he nimbly worked in the benefits of working with a company with this kind of expertise. It was a great way to quietly sell Chayora’s value proposition and looking around the room I could tell the room was enthralled. His thoughts and data points had me thinking and running through scenarios all day long. Having been to many infrastructure conferences and seeing hundreds if not thousands of presentations, anyone who can capture that much of my mindshare for the day is a clear winner.

Tom Furlong and Jay Park of Facebook gave a great talk on OCP with a great focus on their new facility in Sweden. They also talked a bit about their other facilities in Prineville and North Carolina as well. With Furlong taking the Mechanical innovations and Park going through the electrical it was a great talk to created lots of interesting questions. An incredibly captivating portion of the talk was around calculating data center availability. In all honesty it was the first time I had ever seen this topic taken head on at a data center conference. In my experience, like PUE, Availability calculations can fall under the spell of marketing departments who truly don’t understand that there SHOULD be real math behind the calculation. There were two interesting take aways for me. The first was just how impactful this portion of the talk had on the room in general. There was an incredible amount of people taking notes as Jay Park went through the equation and way to think about it. It led me to my second revelation – There are large parts of our industry who don’t know how to do this. In private conversations after their talk some people confided that had never truly understood how to calculate this. It was an interesting wake-up call for me to ensure I covered the basics even in my own talks.

After the Facebook talk it was time for me to mount the stage for Global Thought Leadership Panel. I was joined on stage by some great industry thinkers including Christian Belady of Microsoft, Len Bosack (founder of Cisco Systems) now CEO XKL Systems, Jack Tison-CTO of Panduit, Kfir Godrich-VP and Chief Technologist at HP, John Corcoran-Executive Chairman of Global Switch, and Paul-Francois Cattier-Global VP of Data Centers at Schneider Electric. That’s a lot of people and brainpower to fit on a single stage. We really needed three times the amount of time allotted for this panel, but that is the way these things go. Perhaps one of the most interesting recurring themes from question to question was the general agreement that at the end of the day – great technology means nothing without the will do something different. There was an interesting debate on the differences between enterprise users and large scale users like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and AOL. I was quite chagrined and a little proud to hear AOL named in that list of luminaries (it wasn’t me who brought it up). But I was quick to point out that AOL is a bit different in that it has been around for 30 years and our challenges are EXACTLY like Enterprise data center environments. More on that tomorrow in my keynote I guess.

All in all, it was a good day – there were lots of moments of brilliance in the panel discussions throughout the day. One regret I have was on the panel regarding DCIM. They ran out of time for questions from the audience which was unfortunate. People continue to confuse DCIM as BMS version 2.0 and really miss capturing the work and soft costs, let alone the ongoing commitment to the effort once started. Additionally there is the question of once you have mountains of collected data, what do you do with that. I had a bunch of questions on this topic for the panel, including if any of the major manufacturers were thinking about building a decision engine over the data collection. To me it’s a natural outgrowth and next phase of DCIM. The one case study they discussed was InterXion. It was a great effort but I think in the end maintained the confusion around a BMS with a web interface versus true Facilities and IT integration. Another panel on Modularization got some really lively discussion on feature/functionality and differentiation, and lack of adoption. To a real degree it highlighted an interesting gulf between manufacturers (mostly represented by the panel) who need to differentiate their products and the users who require vendor interoperability of the solution space. It probably doesn’t help to have Microsoft or myself in the audience when it comes to discussions around modular capacity. On to tomorrow!

This morning I sat in on Christian Belady’s presentation at DataCentre2012. I will post small blips about things that interest me as the conference continues.

Both Christian and Laurent Verneray of Schneider each identified 5 megatrends. Interestingly while there were common themes between them at a high level, they attacked the trends from different altitudes of the data centre problem space. Both discussed the coming pressure on water as a resource.

He then went on to talk about the Microsoft Data Center strategy. Its probably worth a specific post from me on my observations on their evolution.